Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes patched perlvar.pod to point out that $^X could contain information from /proc/self/exe,
on platforms that supported it.
But even on platforms that do support it,
such as Linux,
you can still run into grief with chrooted environments.
Nevertheless,
Rafael Garcia-Suarez liked the patch enough to accept it.
Nicholas Clark pointed out that the name is different on FreeBSD and Solaris.

Alan Burlison showed how to find the name of executable on Solaris without having to rely on access to /proc,
which interested Rafael.
Gisle Aas was unable to compile Alan's snippet,
and it turned out that the technique Alan was relying on was only fairly recently made available on Solaris.
So he coded another approach.

An improvement to $^X
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-01/msg01062.html
An earlier, similar attempt
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2001-11/msg01559.html

so he wrote some code to find out what was going on. And afterwards he still couldn't figure out where and when the Windows GetLastError was being called. Jan Dubois clarified the issue concerning whether what GetLastError returns is relevant or not. And I think the discussion stopped there.

Jim Cromie sent in a consolidated patch that implements putting all the arenas into a singly-linked list. He then sent in a patch to implement meta-arenas, which allow perl to separate the meta-information about the arena from the arena itself, which results in some small savings of memory.

Lukasz Debowski filed bug #38379 that showed how to make perl dump core when trying to match a string against a particularly arduous regular expression. Yves Orton explained that the problem came from excessive back-tracking that the pattern forced the regexp engine to undertake, and offered a couple of ideas about how to rewrite the pattern in question to make it more efficient.

Lukasz thought that it should be possible to get the regexp engine to bail out gracefully under such circumstances and provide a more informative error message about the problem.

Patches, as they say, are welcome.
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-01/msg01112.html

Eagle-eyed "p.boven" spotted a documentation error in perlfunc.pod, filed as bug #38380. Trying to find the error by reading the patch alone is just about impossible, fortunately a description of the problem was included in the report. Nicholas applied the patch.

Try and spot the difference by reading the patch
http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2006-01/msg01117.html

Paul Boutros filed bug #38384, wherein traversing a large hash of hashes uses a phenomenal amount of memory. Gisle Aas realised that the problem was merely an issue of numbers being interpreted as strings, thus causing the hashes' SvIV structures to be upgraded to the larger SvPV structures.

There is an issue or two surrounding Camelpack, which is bundle of Activestate and MingW. One issue being that it might be violating Activestate's license terms, and/or the O'Reilly camel trademark, and even possibly R. J. Reynolds as well.

Chase Venters has problems with DateTime, in that it is too slow. He thought about recasting some of the code into C, but learnt that the authors had already tried that, and noticed an overall slowdown, because of the cost of thunking (crossing between Perl and C). And wondered whether there was a way of reducing the cost, and put forward a couple of ideas. Glenn Linderman came up with a pretty good refinement.

Tony Cook mentioned something called Imager that already lets one do something along those lines (or at least, the next release will).

Nick Ing-Simmons suggested Chase take a look at both Tk and and DBI, which have been refining this concept for a decade. Tk, in particular, uses Perl to generate (print) C code, which helps cut down on typos.

and fixed it with change #27034. Nicholas wondered whether Rafael's change was a fix, or just sweeping a problem under the carpet. Because autouse is pretty hairy anyway, Rafael figured that it was all right.

Steven Schubiger grepped through the code base and pinpointed a number of places where Nullav, Nullsv and the like continue to lurk, and wondered whether they could be replaced by NULL, and whether perlapi.pod should note that they are deprecated.

Andy Lester pointed out some even more dubious code constructed that need to be NULLified, and Nicholas admitted to being happy to see them all go.

So Steven tackled Nullav and Nullch first, except that he also deleted the definitions themselves, which would destroy backwards compatibility, so he re-did the patch to keep them.

And then followed up with Nullcv, Nullsv and the rest of the gang. There followed a discussion about the possibly apocryphal hardware whose null pointer bits are not all zero.

Nicholas proposed a patch to make the tokeniser itself UTF-8 aware. This makes two TODO tests pass, but alas another test starts to fail. A code audit is needed to make sure UTF-8-flagged keys are dealt with correctly everywhere. And then the same thing needs to be done to the pad code (the code that deals with lexicals).

Nicholas Clark continued on a roll, trying to track down parallel testing failures, and isolated a race condition between List::Util and Math::BigInt::Fastcalc. It looks as if the Makefile.PL for Math::BigInt::FastCalc is being executed at precisely the same moment that List::Util is being copied to .../lib. Which is of course extremely difficult to reproduce.

Steve Peters was able to identify that the real culprit was in fact overload.pm and not Math::BigInt::FastCalc.

Adam Kennedy heard that nmake (the aging version that can be legally distributed) no longer runs on Vista (or at least, a current beta), and wondered what the solution was. Apparently, there's a dmake floating around that seems to have everyone's favour.

Not that anyone should want to code like that, nor should it be fixed, but that maybe the behaviour be noted somewhere in case someone comes to grief over it. Paul Johnson pointed out the relevant part of perlfunc that does in fact explain it.

Nicholas took Jan Dubois's PERL_TRACK_MEMPOOL code and added some functionality to it to improve the feedback when running under valgrind, and also added a PERL_POISON switch to improve the chances of dying a quick death when buggy code tries to access memory it no longer owns.

This summary was written by David Landgren. I wasn't able to start this until Thursday night, due to various constraints in Real Life (such as drinking beer with the local Perl mongers last night). As a result (of the late start, not the beer) the threshold for interesting-enough-to-summarise threads was higher than usual. Also, I didn't have the time for the witty URL titles. Sorry about that, but a brief summary is better than no summary at all.

Information concerning bugs referenced in this summary (as #nnnnn) may be viewed at http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Ticket/Display.html?id=nnnnn

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